Alternate fuel for TriAlpha Fusion Reactor Design?

Above is a link to a news story about the recent Tri Alpha Energy “breakthrough”.

It looks to me like a very nice development in increased stability of a proposed reactor design.

Tri Alpha emphasizes that it intends to fuel their ultimate reactor with PB (proton-boron) rather than DT (deuterium-tritium). Is there any reason the Tri Alpha design could not be used for DT instead?

Staff: Mentor

The p-B reaction is more challenging than the d-t reaction, simply because Z(B) = 5.

In addition, it is relatively simple to confine D and T to a plasma in a magnetic field, but more difficult to confine B. The higher Z of B means that there are more electrons available for recombination and radiative losses.

Hitting a mass of B with a beam of protons necessarily means that the mass of B will not be solid, and so power density will suffer proportionally with the density of the B.

Tri Alpha emphasizes that it intends to fuel their ultimate reactor with PB (proton-boron) rather than DT (deuterium-tritium). Is there any reason the Tri Alpha design could not be used for DT instead?

Tri-Alpha is studying a concept known as the reversed field configurations (FRC). There are no reasons why a FRC could not be used for a D-T fusion reactor instead of a p-B reactor. The p-B reaction has a number of desirable features, and Tri-Alpha believes that these features more than make up for the additional difficulty of achieving p-B fusion.